Francesca Zunino Harper is a linguist, translator, and publishing professional. She worked in the British and international academia researching on comparative literatures, translation, and women’s and environmental humanities for several years. She now works in the Humanities and Social Sciences area of publishing. You can follow her @ZuninoFrancesca.

A version of this blog post first appeared on the Digital Book World site. Bradley Metrock produced the iBooks Author Conference from 2015 through 2017, before Score Publishing acquired Digital Book World, and has authored many articles on the state of the publishing industry and recent trends.

This article is by Ken Jones of Circular Software. Ken is running the Understanding eBooks day on 25th April 2018.

I’ve been involved in making beautiful and interactive fixed layout ebooks since before there was a standard for such things. But trust me, this one is different… It is truly the finest example of interactive children’s story telling I have ever seen, it contains custom movies on every spread, background audio, professional narration and read aloud text highlighting, placed web code, personalisation, interactive animations and puzzles!

Bradley Metrock produced the iBooks Author Conference from 2015 through 2017, before Score Publishing acquired Digital Book World, and has authored many articles on Apple’s efforts with regards to books and publishing. This piece is in response to last week’s news from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg that Apple is readying Apple Books to compete anew in the digital book marketplace.

Putting aside the constant scare of whether robots will soon take our jobs – coming even from creatives – AI is already here and more and more companies are using it. But what can AI do for publishers, and is there anything publishers can do for AI?

As the New Year kicks-off, it is an opportunity to evaluate and re-think existing relationships – in an effort to make 2017 a more efficient, and smooth-running year. After ten years of working with book publishers on successful projects, from e-book conversions through to some of the most complex typesetting work, Geethik Technologies have decided to share some tips on managing the process. (this blog post first appeared on the Geethik Technologies blog)

1) Communication of deliverables needs to be clear. Rather than sending a series of emails back-and-forth, it’s easier to send a list of everything in one place so that you have a clear record of it, then your supplier can gather important information from one place. For e-book conversions this would be: e- ISBN, output format (reflowable, fixed, voice aloud, animation, interactivity, etc), metadata details, specification information – plus any other additional instructions that might be unique to your project.

2) What other projects can your supplier work on? Having one external point-of-contact is much simpler and less time consuming than having many. E-book conversion houses are often expert typsetters too – and can work in QuarkXPress, InDesign, 3B2, TeX, LaTeX, PageMaker or Microsoft Word. Is it time to establish XML-workflows? Speak to your regular supplier about how they might help. Chances are their proofreading and quality checks can help to save you time and money throughout the year.

3) Introduce the whole team. Over the course of a project there can be a range of people involved in checking files and supplying deliverables. On the outsourced supplier side you should have one project manager whom you communicate with. On your side you might have a colleague who sends the file and then someone in accounts who deals with invoicing. If your supplier knows who is who, it will save you time forwarding emails and files later on in the process.

4) If you are thinking about changing supplier, start with a small project to test the waters and work out who is who. If you are converting from PDF to XML you really need a company who will check the output thoroughly and can clean up any messy code generated in the process. Images usually need extraction for individual manipulation and optimisation. Converting from Word or InDesign produces better results, but they still need to thoroughly check that the mapping process has worked and ensure that there aren’t any other coding errors. Check that a new supplier is proficient at this before enlisting them with critical projects.

5) Make the intellectual property arrangements clear. If you work with Geethik, you will be sent converted ebook files, in the same way a printer provides you with books after printing. However, there are some services which lock your content into their systems and manage your ebooks on your behalf. This can be extremely useful when you start-up, though you will need water-tight intellectual property arrangements contracts should your business circumstances change. Taking ownership of your files and distributing them independently or with another supplier gives you more control of your own intellectual property.

If you are thinking about changing supplier in 2017, then please get in touch and we can arrange a free sample for you to test accuracy and quality of Geethik services.

This is a guest blog post by Steve Connolly, Publishing Director for FE and Digital at Hodder Education. This blog post first appeared on the Publishing Training Centre Blog.

When we pause for thought to contemplate the evolution of digital publishing, it is clear that a revolution has taken place in the way that content is produced and consumed. However, it is equally remarkable (and healthy to note) that print product still drives much of what the publishing industry produces and monetises. The most notable player in terms of driving the eBook revolution (now slowing to an evolution) is Amazon: a major disruptor in online retailing, positioning and recommending product, manufacturing innovative hardware (yes – Kindle was innovative in terms of adopting established technology and making it a mass market device), driving down prices and providing publishers with new ways of packaging and distributing their IP. In addition, mobile technology is now so prevalent worldwide that it cannot be ignored as a means of consuming content.

So, other than driving this rapid growth in digital consumption that can’t be ignored, what does mobile technology represent for publishers? It has promoted the creation of universally adopted (adapted in Amazon’s case) standards in the shape of ePub, and has forced us all to think in terms of the creation of our content in new ways. Any publisher who fails to think in terms of scalable and standards-driven workflow / outputs is not necessarily going to go out of business, but they will seriously hinder their ability to leverage their IP to its greatest potential. Others who have posted on this site have pointed to the ways in which copy-editing has evolved, with most editorial tasks now being completed on screen, including standard mark-up and tagging of content using consumer tools such as Word. This is a quiet but fundamental shift; and where we start to standardise the ways in which we describe elements of content (form and function), we have the foundations of a workflow that results in content that can be re-used with greater efficiency in a myriad of contexts – print, online, mobile, XML, interactive games and assessment etc.

For many of us working in what is ostensibly a creative industry, standards can seem to be the equivalent of watching digital paint dry. In my journey from being a print publisher to someone who creates and helps others create interactive content, I have discovered the importance of standards (tagging, XML, epub etc.) in the planning, generation and distribution of a range of published products – from interactive etextbooks to standardised assessment engines. All of this originates from a set of principles that were agreed across our business and were applied at each point in the supply chain. Some of what we do is driven by international standards and some by our own proprietary rules, allowing us to provide the market with innovative and high-quality content-led services at a faster rate and at lower cost than would have otherwise been the case.

Decisions on “digital” require a multi-component model that considers at least eight aspects, such as:

Developments in technology – what’s important and (importantly) what’s not?

Market expectations

Business expectations and rules

Analysis of the competition

Defining your product

Workflow and content creation

Return on investment

Marketing and selling

Steve is a tutor on the PTC’s flagship course for editors in the educational, academic, scientific and professional sectors, Commissioning and List Management (CLM) happening next on September 25 – 28 2017.

A version of this blog post first appeared on the Digital Book World site. Bradley Metrock produced the iBooks Author Conference from 2015 through 2017, before Score Publishing acquired Digital Book World, and has authored many articles on the state of the publishing industry and recent trends.

This is a guest post by Helen Elmsley. Helen is the Marketing Manager at Virtusales Publishing Solutions, creator of the industry leading Biblio3 suite of publishing software.

You could say that a book is much like an atom. Split it open and there’s a wealth of publishing potential inside. With modern consumers reaching beyond the more traditional printed, digital and audio book formats, publishers have an exciting opportunity to innovate and distribute their content in new ways.

Paula Neary is CEO of Ribbonfish. She has over 20 years of experience in senior roles across academic, education, trade and STM publishing. Prior to working at Ribbonfish she was Director of Business Systems at Springer Nature.

After 30 years in academic publishing (the final 13 years at board level) Jo Burges now co-runs i-Publishing Consultants. The team specialises in working with publishers, cultural heritage organisations and the not-for-profit sector to help them make the very best use of technology and information management and to engage effectively with their customers and members.

My daily hour+ commute to and from work enables me to take in a variety of podcasts, a bit of SiriusXM Radio and, more recently, some quality time with Google Assistant. The latter simply means I press and hold the home button on my Galaxy phone and say, “good morning.” Google takes it from there, providing the local weather and news summaries from a variety of sources.

Digital printing technology has the potential to transform the illustrated book industry.

The classic model for illustrated book publishing established by Paul Hamlyn and others several decades ago saw high overall pre-press and print costs for illustrated titles offset by large print runs, traditionally including one or more coeditions with foreign-language publishers.

Today, most – but certainly not all – illustrated publishing is still large-print run litho printing, produced mainly – but not exclusively – in the Far East as the costs are lower than local UK and European printers.

Over recent years print run quantities have been falling in line with reduced demand from retailers, and, although colour digital printing has become a mature technology, it is still expensive compared to traditional litho methods.

But what will illustrated publishing be like in five, ten or fifteen years?

Short-run digital printing has the potential to transform the business – smaller initial print runs would require less investment up front on new titles and much less costly warehouse space.

If printers could make the cost of colour digital print competitive enough with litho prices to bring illustrated book printing back from the Far East, publishers would be able to cut a month’s shipping time from the schedule.

Some publishers are already innovating using digital print technology – Lost My Name is one prime example. But will the model scale up for all illustrated publishers, or are large print runs here to stay in some genres, such as celebrity food and drink titles for the Christmas market?

Join us for a discussion on the future of illustrated publishing at the London Book Fair on Wednesday 15th March at 2.30 in the Olympia Room, Grand Hall, with an expert panel featuring Rebecca Smart, MD, Ebury Publishing, James Carey, Director of Publishing Operations, UK, The Quarto Group, Nick Marsh, Vice President of Product, Lost My Name, and Sharon Williams, Sales Manager, Short Run Press Ltd.

Charles is Publishing Manager at Amber Books Ltd, an independent London-based publisher and book packager that specialises in creating illustrated non-fiction titles in print and digital formats for adults and children. Recent and forthcoming titles include Abandoned Places, Haiku, Best-Selling Albums, Camouflage at War, Fantastic Fearsome Beasts and the Bloody History of London. Charles is responsible for all things concerning editorial, design, marketing and digital at Amber.

Is 2017 the year you start to read up on the industry and changes sweeping the publishing world? Well we have made it a bit easier for you. Throughout 2016, Geethik Technologies have been bookmarking the very best discussions around ebooks and publishing from across the web, and have compiled them into one handy list for you here. (this blog post first appeared on the Geethik Technologies blog)